Facebook costliest outage caused $160 million loss: NetBlocks

It wasn’t the small matter of a social networking website going offline for a short period. When Facebook went offline globally for almost 6 hours in the early hours of October 5, it resulted in a mad scramble to find a fix and the cause of the outage. The enormity of the problem was compounded by the fact that the most popular messaging app in the world, WhatsApp, along with Instagram and Messenger, as well as Facebook Workplace too stopped working. Facebook eventually said that a configuration change to its backbone routers was the reason for services to go offline. It wasn’t hacked, the social media giant insisted. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have since apologized for the inconvenience caused by the sudden disruption. However, the human or technical error has cost more than just inconvenience to the billions of Facebook app family users, globally.

The cost of this outage, according to cybersecurity watchdog NetBlocks, was to the tune of $160 million to the global economy. The Cost Of Shutdown Tool (COST) estimates the loss caused by an internet disruption using specific indicators including from World Bank and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Facebook’s share price tumbled, and data suggests that Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, lost as much as $7 billion and Facebook saw $40 billion in market capitalisation wiped out. “Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt,” explained Santosh Janardhan, vice president of Infrastructure at Facebook.